The Qing Dynasty was one of the most developed countries in economy around the world in the 17th and 18th century. Due to its prosperousness, there was a population boom at that period of time, reaching as much as three hundred million. In order to catch up with the growing population, the production of agricultural products also increased, owning to the Qing’s innovative policy of cultivating new wasteland. Manufacturing goods were mainly textiles and porcelains, which were usually traded as commerce by the Qing merchants with foreigners. The trading system in Qing was also quite flourishing; however, with more interactions, the Qing traders noticed some of the foreign merchants to have more intentions other than simply trade with them. Being on guard against foreign traders, the Qing established the Canton system, which set the rule that Canton was the only city open to trade with the Europeans, and thus lowered the risk of being invaded.
Political Backdrop
The Qing Dynasty of China, established early in the 17th century by the Manchus, who conquered the Ming under Li Zicheng’s regime, enjoyed great prosperity. Of all the Qing emperors, three of them were most famous and significant for the Qing reached its peak during the period of their regime. They were Emperor Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong. In order to consolidate power in a place where the population was dominated by the Hans, the Manchu emperors had come up with several policies: #1: The Qing emperors authorized regions like Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang to have their own form of local administration and offered them imperial patronage to won their endorsement on their conquering of western mainland China. #2: In order to administrate a vast population, the Manchu emperors astutely promulgated adaptable policies to show their respect for the Ming’s former practices: reserving the imperial examination system and the social hierarchies of age, gender, and kin. #3: However, the Manchus also had impositions on the Hans in order to weaken their national consciousness as Han people. In 1645, Changed emperor ordered the Hans to shave their heads into the Manchu hairstyle and wear clothes as the Manchu practice. Whoever refused to do so would get killed immediately. The picture on the right shows the Manchu hairstyle for men, called a tonsured hear and queue.
The Qing had a strictly ranked social hierarchy. The emperor was the at the top, making all types of political and military decisions with the advisory of a coupe of credible officials, who ranked the second highest on the social hierarchy. Because of the widespread reputation of Confucianism, most of the Qing emperors respected and well treated the scholars who had made significant achievement in the study of Confucianism. Therefore, Qing scholars enjoyed quite a high status in the society. Besides the emperor, officials, and scholars, the people with the highest ranking would be the wealthy ones – bureaucrats. The rest of the people in Qing society were the lower classes, which could basically be divided into two categories. One was the peasants, artisans, and merchants, who owned a decent job with stable income; the other was the actors, who gained such little respect in the society that were almost at the same rank as the prostitutes and the beggars.
In ancient Chinese society, women’s status had always been lower than the men’s. However, people’s view of gender roles started to change during the Qing Dynasty. The Manchu people were well known for their belligerence and toughness, and these special characteristics were also in their women’s blood. The Manchu women, who enjoyed equal opportunity to ride horses and fight as men, brought new understandings of the role and ability of women to the Qing. In the Law of the Qing Dynasty, one of the law of divorces indicated the role of women were starting to shift to be equal as men. In late Qing Dynasty, more girls were encouraged to go to school and be educated. There were many excellent female poets at that time, and they enjoyed the same popularity as male poets.
The economy of the Qing was mainly supported by agriculture. Thus, most people living in rural areas were peasants, who owned and cultivated their own lands. However, they had been facing a huge challenge – the floods. Therefore, the Qing government had been seeking for different and efficient methods to prevent the flood. See the video below 3:40-8:23 for more details on the Qing’s dealing with the flood in rural areas.
Education
The education system in the Qing Dynasty had gone through an important and influential change. It shifted from the feudal education that emphasizes on the Confucianism and overlooks natural science to the westernized education. In the early period of the Qing Dynasty, the education system basically reserved that of the Ming, but with more variety of subjects and was more universal. The context of the education, however, was still all about Confucianism, including the Four Books and Five Classics, the Zizhi Tongjian, Law of the Qing Dynasty, etc. The Imperial Examination System was used to pick the government officials; the topics on the examination were selected from the Four Books and Five Classics, which constrained students’ idea with the eight-legged essay. Such education system left China behind, comparing to other countries in the world in the same time period. When the Opium War broke out in 1840 and ended with the victory of England, Chinese people felt deeply obliged to study the western advanced technologies. Wei Yuan, a famous Qing scholar, wrote in his book the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms, “To learn from the technologies in the West in order to resist the invasion of the Western powers” (P215,The Variation Theory of Comparative Literature by Shunqing Cao). The quote had an eternal influence on the future Chinese education system. Ever since then, Qing scholars incorporated the western science subjects with the Chinese Confucianism and created a new set of education system, which has successfully facilitated the development of China.
Artistic Innovation
The Qing Dynasty has made high accomplishments in art, especially in Literati Painting, also called the ink wash painting. It was originated in the Song Dynasty, and became most prestigious in the Qing Dynasty for combining the idea of literature and art together. The essential idea of Literati Painting, according to Chen Shizeng, a famous Qing Literati Painting artistist, was not about the fancy art techniques, but more about the literary implication. Most of the Literati Paintings featured the landscapes, birds, and the Four Noble Ones (the orchid, the bamboo, the chrysanthemum, and the plum blossom). The Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou were the most well known artists in Qing. Famous for their unconventional and consummate skills, they enjoyed a rather peculiar reputation that was usually half good and half bad; good for their spirit of innovation and high achievements in art, and bad for their cranky characteristics. Overall, the Literati Paintings in Qing had a profound and lasting influence on the Chinese aesthetic and techniques of ink wash paintings.
-----Bamboo------------------------Bamboo and Rocks-----------------------------Spray of Bamboo--------------- --Wu Changshuo-----------------------Zheng Xie----------------------------------------Zhu Da---------------------- Late 19th - early 20th century----------1759----------------------------------------------1681----------------------- Yale University Art Gallery----University of California----------------Princeton University Art Museum----
The three paintings shown above all depicted the same object - the Bamboo. Bamboo, as one of the Four Noble Ones, was poetized to carry the meaning of strength, bravery, honesty and justice in Chinese literature. Thus, it appeared to be one of the most favored items to be portrayed to represent the artists’ moral uprightness.
Here are a couple of more classical examples of Qing Literati Paintings:
Lotuses on a Summer Evening Yun Shouping 1684 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Three Peaks of the Upper Realm Shitao 1701-05 Princeton University Art Museum
Landscapes After the Ancient Masters Wang Hui 1674 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Classic literary texts
Embedded above is selected from the book Sui Yuan Shi Hua, by the famous Qing litterateur Yuan Mei. In the selection, Yuan Mei described in great detail the view of a beautiful garden that he visited. One of the most favored objects of one's writing, in the Qing Dynasty, was landscapes and the pure pleasure of life. From late 17th century to late 18th century, when the three great emperors ruled over the empire, Qing was at a time of peace and prosperity. Thus, lots of the literature works written at that time depicted the greatness of nature. Sui Yuan Shi Hua is a typical work of Qing classic literature.
Religion
When thinking about religion in China, the word being brought up the most would likely to be "Confucianism". However, it is a general misunderstanding to think of Confucianism as a religion. Confucianism, founded by Confucius, the great philosopher and politician during the Spring and Autumn period, was actually a system of teachings that was significant for its idea of Ren, meaning humaneness. This idea of Confucianism was dominant in China; thus, if it was considered a type of religion, it is definitely the greatest religion in Chinese history. Eliminating Confucianism, you would probably think of Buddhism as the main religion in China. The Qing's policy on Buddhism basically inherited that of the Ming, however, the first type of Buddhism to interact with the Qing emperor was the Lamaism originated in Tibet. Back in the 17th century, the lamas from Xinjiang came to Beijing as missionaries and were well treated by the Nurhaci, the founding father of Qing Dynasty. In the following hundreds of years, the missionaries from Tibet had developed an amicable relation with the Qing emperors, promoting the connection between Tibet and Chinese central government. And as more Buddhist temples were built (for more detail on Lamaism temples, see section "Architecture"), more people chose to become a monk or nun, Buddhism had developed a profound influence in China that can not be neglected.
Architecture
The Gardens of Qing enjoyed a high reputation all around the world. The architectures resembled the Ming, however were more exquisite. The Qing emperors constructed many large-scale gardens, of which the most well known one to be the Old Summer Palace.
The Old Summer Palace, known by the nickname “Garden of Gardens”, contained a collection of more than 150 refined gardens, palaces and towers. Started in the 18th century, the construction of the Summer Palace took more than a hundred years and cost approximately 200 million taels (the Chinese currency at the time). The Summer Palace was actually named Yuanming Yuan by the Yongzheng Emperor. “Yuan” means circle, and according to ancient Chinese believes, circle has the idea of perfection and satisfaction. “Ming” means light, suggesting the emperor under the rule of Yongzheng to be flourishing like the sun. Besides, as a pious Buddhism believer, Yongzheng chose to name the Palace “Yuanming” also because it was his Buddhist name.Unfortunately, the Old Summer Palace was ransacked and burned down by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 during their invasion of China. Today, if you come to visit Yuanming Yuan, there would only be remnants of it.
As shown on the left, Chengde Mountain Resort consists of a series of imperial palaces. Serving as a place for the emperors to both avoid the heat in the summer and issue political affairs, Chengde Mountain Resort is famous for its picturesque scenery. Moreover, the ingenious utilization of the landform and the explicit partition of different sections in the resort also make it a very peculiar construction. The imperial palaces in the resort all follows a precious yet austere layout, fusing harmoniously with the natural landscapes together. Owning to its ascetic appeal and exquisite design, Chengde Mountain Resort can be considered a milestone in the history of Chinese architecture.
The picture on the right was a close-up of the Lama Temple. First built in 1694, the temple was originally used as the residence of court eunuchs. After Yongzheng passed away and his coffin been placed in here for a couple of days, it was converted into a lamasery for Buddhism practices. The temple is mainly made up of five magnificent halls with three decorated archways. The architectural style of the Lama Temple is very special for its incorporation of several ethnic elements including the Han, Manchu and Mongols.
Observations about what we have learned.
Throughout the process of reading the textbook, researching online, and selecting and interpreting the information that is useful for my project, I learned that in order to come up with a clear, complete, and most importantly, objective statement, it is necessary to find different resources to compare and contrast, for some of the information, especially on the Internet, could be wrong or one-sided. For example, some of the website pages I visited described Confusinism as a main religion in China; however, when I did further research and browsed over an authoritative book, An Introduction to Confucianism, by Xinzhong Yao, in which Confucianism is actually characterized as "a form of learning", I realized the importance of researching on authoritative sources and not to assume everything online is correct.Besides, the process of researching also grew my knowledge on the Qing Dynasty's history, as well as giving me a new understanding of it.
Bibliography
[1] Tignor Robert, Worlds Together Worlds Apart Third Edition,Asia In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries , p507-511 [2] Beck, Sanderson. "Qing Empire 1644-1799." Qing Empire 1644-1799. N.p., n.d. Web. [3] "Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan." Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan. N.p., n.d. [4]"1450 to 1750: China | Asia for Educators | Columbia University." 1450 to 1750: China | Asia for Educators | Columbia University. N.p., n.d. [5]"Qing Dynasty Art Works." Artstor. N.p., n.d.
The Qing Dynasty by Joyce Guo
Map during the time period.
Economic Backdrop
The Qing Dynasty was one of the most developed countries in economy around the world in the 17th and 18th century. Due to its prosperousness, there was a population boom at that period of time, reaching as much as three hundred million. In order to catch up with the growing population, the production of agricultural products also increased, owning to the Qing’s innovative policy of cultivating new wasteland. Manufacturing goods were mainly textiles and porcelains, which were usually traded as commerce by the Qing merchants with foreigners. The trading system in Qing was also quite flourishing; however, with more interactions, the Qing traders noticed some of the foreign merchants to have more intentions other than simply trade with them. Being on guard against foreign traders, the Qing established the Canton system, which set the rule that Canton was the only city open to trade with the Europeans, and thus lowered the risk of being invaded.
Political Backdrop
The Qing Dynasty of China, established early in the 17th century by the Manchus, who conquered the Ming under Li Zicheng’s regime, enjoyed great prosperity. Of all the Qing emperors, three of them were most famous and significant for the Qing reached its peak during the period of their regime. They were Emperor Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong. In order to consolidate power in a place where the population was dominated by the Hans, the Manchu emperors had come up with several policies:
#1: The Qing emperors authorized regions like Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang to have their own form of local administration and offered them imperial patronage to won their endorsement on their conquering of western mainland China.
#2: In order to administrate a vast population, the Manchu emperors astutely promulgated adaptable policies to show their respect for the Ming’s former practices: reserving the imperial examination system and the social hierarchies of age, gender, and kin.
#3: However, the Manchus also had impositions on the Hans in order to weaken their
national consciousness as Han people. In 1645, Changed emperor ordered the Hans to shave their heads into the Manchu hairstyle and wear clothes as the Manchu practice. Whoever refused to do so would get killed immediately. The picture on the right shows the Manchu hairstyle for men, called a tonsured hear and queue.
----------------------------------------------------------Administration Structure---------------------------------------------------------
Timeline
Social Backdrop
The Qing had a strictly ranked social hierarchy. The emperor was the at the top, making all types of political and military decisions with the advisory of a coupe of credible officials, who ranked the second highest on the social hierarchy. Because of the widespread reputation of Confucianism, most of the Qing emperors respected and well treated the scholars who had made significant achievement in the study of Confucianism. Therefore, Qing scholars enjoyed quite a high status in the society. Besides the emperor, officials, and scholars, the people with the highest ranking would be the wealthy ones – bureaucrats. The rest of the people in Qing society were the lower classes, which could basically be divided into two categories. One was the peasants, artisans, and merchants, who owned a decent job with stable income; the other was the actors, who gained such little respect in the society that were almost at the same rank as the prostitutes and the beggars.
In ancient Chinese society, women’s status had always been lower than the men’s. However, people’s view of gender roles started to change during the Qing Dynasty. The Manchu people were well known for their belligerence and toughness, and these special characteristics were also in their women’s blood. The Manchu women, who enjoyed equal opportunity to ride horses and fight as men, brought new understandings of the role and ability of women to the Qing. In the Law of the Qing Dynasty, one of the law of divorces indicated the role of women were starting to shift to be equal as men. In late Qing Dynasty, more girls were encouraged to go to school and be educated. There were many excellent female poets at that time, and they enjoyed the same popularity as male poets.
The economy of the Qing was mainly supported by agriculture. Thus, most people living in rural areas were peasants, who owned and cultivated their own lands. However, they had been facing a huge challenge – the floods. Therefore, the Qing government had been seeking for different and efficient methods to prevent the flood. See the video below 3:40-8:23 for more details on the Qing’s dealing with the flood in rural areas.Education
The education system in the Qing Dynasty had gone through an important and influential change. It shifted from the feudal education that emphasizes on the Confucianism and overlooks natural science to the westernized education. In the early period of the Qing Dynasty, the education system basically reserved that of the Ming, but with more variety of subjects and was more universal.
The context of the education, however, was still all about Confucianism, including the Four Books and Five Classics, the Zizhi Tongjian, Law of the Qing Dynasty, etc. The Imperial Examination System was used to pick the government officials; the topics on the examination were selected from the Four Books and Five Classics, which constrained students’ idea with the eight-legged essay. Such education system left China behind, comparing to other countries in the world in the same time period. When the Opium War broke out in 1840 and ended with the victory of England, Chinese people felt deeply obliged to study the western advanced technologies. Wei Yuan, a famous Qing scholar, wrote in his book the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms, “To learn from the technologies in the West in order to resist the invasion of the Western powers” (P215,The Variation Theory of Comparative Literature by Shunqing Cao). The quote had an eternal influence on the future Chinese education system. Ever since then, Qing scholars incorporated the western science subjects with the Chinese Confucianism and created a new set of education system, which has successfully facilitated the development of China.
Artistic Innovation
The Qing Dynasty has made high accomplishments in art, especially in Literati Painting, also called the ink wash painting. It was originated in the Song Dynasty, and became most prestigious in the Qing Dynasty for combining the idea of literature and art together. The essential idea of Literati Painting, according to Chen Shizeng, a famous Qing Literati Painting artistist, was not about the fancy art techniques, but more about the literary implication. Most of the Literati Paintings featured the landscapes, birds, and the Four Noble Ones (the orchid, the bamboo, the chrysanthemum, and the plum blossom). The Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou were the most well known artists in Qing. Famous for their unconventional and consummate skills, they enjoyed a rather peculiar reputation that was usually half good and half bad; good for their spirit of innovation and high achievements in art, and bad for their cranky characteristics. Overall, the Literati Paintings in Qing had a profound and lasting influence on the Chinese aesthetic and techniques of ink wash paintings.
-----Bamboo------------------------Bamboo and Rocks-----------------------------Spray of Bamboo-----------------Wu Changshuo-----------------------Zheng Xie----------------------------------------Zhu Da----------------------
Late 19th - early 20th century----------1759----------------------------------------------1681-----------------------
Yale University Art Gallery----University of California----------------Princeton University Art Museum----
The three paintings shown above all depicted the same object - the Bamboo. Bamboo, as one of the Four Noble Ones, was poetized to carry the meaning of strength, bravery, honesty and justice in Chinese literature. Thus, it appeared to be one of the most favored items to be portrayed to represent the artists’ moral uprightness.
Here are a couple of more classical examples of Qing Literati Paintings:
Lotuses on a Summer Evening
Yun Shouping
1684
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Three Peaks of the Upper Realm
Shitao
1701-05
Princeton University Art Museum
Landscapes After the Ancient Masters
Wang Hui
1674
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Classic literary texts
Embedded above is selected from the book Sui Yuan Shi Hua, by the famous Qing litterateur Yuan Mei. In the selection, Yuan Mei described in great detail the view of a beautiful garden that he visited. One of the most favored objects of one's writing, in the Qing Dynasty, was landscapes and the pure pleasure of life. From late 17th century to late 18th century, when the three great emperors ruled over the empire, Qing was at a time of peace and prosperity. Thus, lots of the literature works written at that time depicted the greatness of nature. Sui Yuan Shi Hua is a typical work of Qing classic literature.
Religion
When thinking about religion in China, the word being brought up the most would likely to be "Confucianism". However, it is a general misunderstanding to think of Confucianism as a religion. Confucianism, founded by Confucius, the great philosopher and politician during the Spring and Autumn period, was actually a system of teachings that was significant for its idea of Ren, meaning humaneness. This idea of Confucianism was dominant in China; thus, if it was considered a type of religion, it is definitely the greatest religion in Chinese history.
Eliminating Confucianism, you would probably think of Buddhism as the main religion in China. The Qing's policy on Buddhism basically inherited that of the Ming, however, the first type of Buddhism to interact with the Qing emperor was the Lamaism originated in Tibet. Back in the 17th century, the lamas from Xinjiang came to Beijing as missionaries and were well treated by the Nurhaci, the founding father of Qing Dynasty. In the following hundreds of years, the missionaries from Tibet had developed an amicable relation with the Qing emperors, promoting the connection between Tibet and Chinese central government. And as more Buddhist temples were built (for more detail on Lamaism temples, see section "Architecture"), more people chose to become a monk or nun, Buddhism had developed a profound influence in China that can not be neglected.
Architecture
The Gardens of Qing enjoyed a high reputation all around the world. The architectures resembled the Ming, however were more exquisite. The Qing emperors constructed many large-scale gardens, of which the most well known one to be the Old Summer Palace.
The Old Summer Palace, known by the
nickname “Garden of Gardens”, contained a collection of more
than 150 refined gardens, palaces and towers. Started in the 18th century, the construction of the Summer Palace took more than a hundred years and cost approximately 200 million taels (the Chinese currency at the time). The Summer Palace was actually named Yuanming Yuan by the Yongzheng Emperor. “Yuan” means circle, and according to ancient Chinese believes, circle has the idea of perfection and satisfaction. “Ming” means light, suggesting the emperor under the rule of Yongzheng to be flourishing like the sun. Besides, as a pious Buddhism believer, Yongzheng chose to name the Palace “Yuanming” also because it was his Buddhist name.Unfortunately, the Old Summer Palace was ransacked and burned down by the Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 during their invasion of China. Today, if you come to visit Yuanming Yuan, there would only be remnants of it.
The picture on the right was a close-up of the
Lama Temple. First built in 1694, the temple was originally used as the residence of court eunuchs. After Yongzheng passed away and his coffin been placed in here for a couple of days, it was converted into a lamasery for Buddhism practices. The temple is mainly made up of five magnificent halls with three decorated archways. The architectural style of the Lama Temple is very special for its incorporation of several ethnic elements including the Han, Manchu and Mongols.
Observations about what we have learned.
Throughout the process of reading the textbook, researching online, and selecting and interpreting the information that is useful for my project, I learned that in order to come up with a clear, complete, and most importantly, objective statement, it is necessary to find different resources to compare and contrast, for some of the information, especially on the Internet, could be wrong or one-sided. For example, some of the website pages I visited described Confusinism as a main religion in China; however, when I did further research and browsed over an authoritative book, An Introduction to Confucianism, by Xinzhong Yao, in which Confucianism is actually characterized as "a form of learning", I realized the importance of researching on authoritative sources and not to assume everything online is correct.Besides, the process of researching also grew my knowledge on the Qing Dynasty's history, as well as giving me a new understanding of it.
Bibliography
[1] Tignor Robert, Worlds Together Worlds Apart Third Edition,Asia In The Seventeenth And Eighteenth Centuries , p507-511[2] Beck, Sanderson. "Qing Empire 1644-1799." Qing Empire 1644-1799. N.p., n.d. Web.
[3] "Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan." Modern Mongolia: Reclaiming Genghis Khan. N.p., n.d.
[4]"1450 to 1750: China | Asia for Educators | Columbia University." 1450 to 1750: China | Asia for Educators | Columbia University. N.p., n.d.
[5]"Qing Dynasty Art Works." Artstor. N.p., n.d.